Saturday, 31 March 2018

How Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Are Trying to Upend Space ExplorationAuthor Tim Fernholz looks at companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin–and their predecessors–which promise to save lots of money with more efficient rockets.How Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Are Trying to Upend Space Exploration[Photo: SpaceX]

By Daniel Terdiman 6 minute Read

When SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket in early February, it was one of the best public relations events in the recent history of space exploration–and not just because Elon Musk’s company put a Tesla into the heavens.advertisement

Millions of people watched the launch and saw SpaceX try to bring all three rockets back to Earth, ultimately crashing one just a few meters away from its at-sea droneship landing pad. What brought everyone together was the exciting promise of a private space company showcasing its massive rockets–and the potential promise of carrying massive payloads into the skies at a radically cheap price. Never mind that NASA appears to have lost some interest in the Falcon Heavy; the public is on board. You would think that eventually, the space agency would have to follow.

The private space race has been in full throttle for several years now, with some of Earth’s richest people pushing many of their chips into the middle of the table in a bid to come out on top. And that’s what Quartz reporter Tim Fernholz explores in his new book, Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race.

Recently, I got ahold of Fernholz to see how much stock we should put into the efforts by Musk, Bezos, and other tycoons to win the race.

Fast Company: Why did you want to write this book?

Tim Fernholz: Because it seemed like a big piece of history was happening and it wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. It’s sort of a pivotal moment in the way humanity engages with space, and it’s an exciting story, and it’s got a lot of implications for the future, too.

FC: Why wasn’t it getting the attention it deserves?advertisement

TF: I think it’s easy to discount a lot of these guys, and a lot of these companies, as being kooky, or making claims they can’t back up. Only in the last five years have we seen these companies prove that it is a new generation, and they can do things that NASA did, and even things that NASA can’t do.

FC: It sounds like you believe these people should be taken seriously as players in the space industry?

TF: Yeah, and I think anyone in the space industry would say that’s an objective fact now. If you look at especially SpaceX’s impact on the global launch industry–the Europe satellite launch company Arianespace, United Launch Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture–have all had to dramatically change their business plans because of SpaceX’s success, which has opened up a lot of opportunity for new companies following in their wake, a lot of funding, and a lot of willingness to believe in business models that haven’t been tried before.

FC: Why do you think SpaceX has been so successful? What are the one or two things that they really did right that got them to this place?

TF: It’s a couple different things. One is they started from a blank slate, and they didn’t get drawn into status-quo industry problems, whether it’s funding models, or subcontracting, or not trusting off-the-shelf components. They really said, let’s do this as cheaply as possibly, and make that our goal.

The second thing is a willingness to take risks that NASA didn’t have, particularly in investing in this reusable rocket system that has allowed them to make their spacecraft much cheaper than their competitors’.advertisement

Related: SpaceX Just Got FCC Approval To Provide Satellite-Based Broadband Around The World

FC: There were so many consecutive times when the Falcon 9 exploded. Do you feel like they just kept their confidence that it was going to work eventually, or did they ever lose some confidence?

TF: I think there were points where they were like, “If we don’t succeed in flying this rocket next week, we’re going to run out of money and close up shop.” But I think they always believed that they could accomplish their goals. The difference is if NASA had a reusable rocket program that blew up as many rockets trying to land them as SpaceX did, Congress probably would have canceled that program. But because SpaceX is controlled by Elon, he said, “Let’s keep going.”

FC: What are the stakes for this new space race?

TF: Hypothetically, billions of dollars in business, both for launching satellites, which is something that Musk is doing, and Jeff Bezos wants to do with Blue Origin; and in operating satellite constellations, which a bunch of different people, including SpaceX, OneWeb, Boeing, LeoSat, are all putting billions of dollars into. And then possibly, these guys are driven by the hope of taking humanity into space on a permanent basis, and that’s what they want to achieve. It’s still kind of far-fetched, but they are building the tools that will allow people to do it. And I think you have to look at what they’re doing, and say, “Okay, this is something we have to think about as a possibility.”

FC: What does the private space race mean for national agencies like NASA?advertisement

TF: On the one hand, it means they’ll be able to buy access to space a lot more cheaply than they have in the past, so that can mean more frequent space probes to other planets to do research. It’s going to hopefully mean the return of human spaceflight for the United States, for the first time since 2011, when Boeing and SpaceX fly astronauts later this year and early in 2019, and it’s also going to mean a rethink of what their mission is. When the Falcon Heavy launched last month, it was a wakeup call to NASA that these private companies are capable of doing really big tasks, like operating the largest rocket in the world, and they need to think, “Well, what is the government’s best place to focus their resources, and how can we leverage the private sector to do that?”

FC: Ultimately, how do you think the public benefits from this private space race?

TF: You can see it already just as taxpayers because now the government’s paying much less to launch military satellites or GPS satellites, because SpaceX came in and disrupted that market. So that’s a key thing. I think there’s a lot of promise in different satellite business models that can deliver internet connectivity more cheaply, television more cheaply, enable internet-of-things stuff, and already space is fundamental to how we live. Every financial transaction, practically, that you make is timed by the GPS system.

The U.S. military also depends on space to do its thing. So you’re relying more on space every day than you may realize.

Related: Jeff Bezos Shows What Your Blue Origin Ride Into Space Will Be Like

FC: What will readers be most surprised to learn?advertisement

TF: The thing that surprised me a lot, coming into this as someone who was not a space expert, is how much history there was of people trying and failing to do this, to start private organizations that will do space flight and space activities.

In the ’80s there were companies that tried and failed, in the ’90s there were companies that tried and failed. And only in this new generation are we seeing people succeeding, which is why it’s really noteworthy. But it was interesting to read one of the works I came across, by Alexander McDonald, who’s an economist who works at NASA, and he has put together this data set that shows wealthy people, billionaire-equivalents, have been investing in private space exploration for well over a century now.

It’s just back in the 18th century, it was building a huge telescope. So the wealthiest man in California built a huge telescope observatory, and that happened in the 19th century. And now the wealthiest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, is building a huge rocket to build space stations in space. So history tends to [repeat itself].

FC: How much fun did you have writing this book?

TF: I had a lot of fun. I got to go to a lot of rocket launches, which was really cool. I got to visit a lot of high-tech facilities where people a lot smarter than me explained rocket science to me, which I found very enjoyable. And I got to meet a lot of people who are very passionate about space and the future, which is always exciting. And I got to meet Elon, which was fun, too.About the author

Daniel Terdiman is a San Francisco-based technology journalist with nearly 20 years of experience. A veteran of CNET and VentureBeat, Daniel has also written for Wired, The New York Times, Time, and many other publications.

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In Syria, local relief organizations shoulder 75% of the aid effort, but receive less than 1% of the funding for the crisis–most goes to large international NGOs. A new platform called CanDo wants to tip the balance back toward the grassroots.This New Platform Lets You Donate Directly To Humanitarian Projects[Image: courtesy CanDo]

By Eillie Anzilotti 3 minute Read

Rola Hallam was practicing as a doctor in the United Kingdom when war broke out in her home country of Syria in 2011. “I did the only thing I knew I could do and got involved in the humanitarian response, delivering medical aid,” she tells Fast Company.advertisement

Hallam, worked with several Syrian-based organizations including Hand-in-Hand for Syria, a charity providing on-the-ground medical aid. Over the course of four years, she volunteered, helping to set up six hospitals. Her experience on the ground in Syria inspired her to launch CanDo, platform to directly fund the kind of work she and her fellow volunteers were carrying out. She is one of this year’s TED Fellows.[Photo: courtesy CanDo]

Throughout her time in Syria, Hallam “began to realize the humanitarian aid system is fundamentally flawed,” she says. The groups she volunteered with comprised mostly Syrians–nurses, doctors, and general aid workers. While these Syrian NGOs and aid workers were delivering around 75% of the humanitarian response in the country, they were receiving less than 1% of direct funding. “This is not just the case in Syria, but in most of the crises in the world,” Hallam says.

In 2014, for instance, over $2.1 billion in relief money flowed into Syria. The vast majority of it went to United Nations organizations or international nonprofits. Those large groups would contract with the smaller Syrian NGOs, like the ones Hallam was working with, to carry out relief projects, but funds often did not reach the aid workers on the ground.

To Hallam, that was an issue. The on-the-ground organizations in Syria were most effective at delivering aid because knew the communities they were serving. They knew where to go for supplies, which leaders among the community to tap for organizing, and the best routes to travel in between sites. They had the potential to work effectively and with a sensitivity to the cultural context and the circumstances in which they found themselves.

What they lacked was funding. In 2016, Hallam founded CanDo to directly fund local humanitarian groups carrying out aid work in their own communities. CanDo functions like a crowdfunding platform for local humanitarian aid campaigns, specifically those providing health care services, and also provides capacity-building support to the campaigns it partners with. “It’s like a startup accelerator for humanitarian organizations,” Hallam says.

CanDo launched its first campaign after bombs destroyed five hospitals, including a children’s facility, in Aleppo. The Syrian organization Independent Doctors Association wanted to rebuild the children’s hospital, which was the only children’s hospital in eastern rural Aleppo, and served around 170,000 young people. But the organization lacked adequate funds. CanDo set up a crowdfunding campaign to establish a “People’s Convoy” that would transmit not just funding, but building and medical supplies from the UK to Syria so IDA could begin the rebuild. Around 5,000 individual donors came up with over $250,000, and the rebuilt hospital opened in April 2017.advertisement[Photo: courtesy CanDo]

The People’s Convoy, to Hallam, proved CanDo’s concept. “It provides people around the world to support directly into the heart of a crisis, and know exactly where their money is going,” Hallam says. Just as people fund a project on Kickstarter in the anticipation that it will produce a tangible result, so too can people who donate through CanDo see the end result of their funding.

Since the People’s Convoy, CanDo has partnered with four other NGOs. Insan provides psychological support to people in crisis zones, Hurras delivers education and social support for children and advocates for children’s rights, Bihar couples emergency relief services with long-term sustainable building and development projects, and Ghiras Al Nahda focuses on helping people access education and economic support. Hallam was particularly excited about Ghiras Al Nahda’s campaign, which was fully funded last year and distributed mushroom-growing kits to 160 families who were struggling to feed themselves. Because mushrooms contain the most protein of any vegetable, they’re often known as “the poor-man’s meat,” and they’re simple, quick, and low-maintenance to grow–essentially ideal for crisis conditions.

While CanDo has only existed for a little over 18 months, Hallam is optimistic that it will help to reconfigure the way humanitarian aid is funded and carried out by focusing on direct aid to on-the-ground workers. She’s hoping to use her experience as a TED Fellow to connect with people working in other crisis zones around the world to grow CanDo’s impact.

“We’re starting in the Syria context but we aim to be a global platform, supporting local humanitarians across the different crises of the world,” Hallam says.About the author

Eillie Anzilotti is an assistant editor for Fast Company's Ideas section, covering sustainability, social good, and alternative economies. Previously, she wrote for CityLab.

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A leaked itinerary shows that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is meeting presidents, media moguls and business titans on his whirlwind three-week tour of the USSabrina Siddiqui

Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington @SabrinaSiddiqui

Sat 31 Mar 2018 06.00 BSTLast modified on Sat 31 Mar 2018 06.02 BST

Mohammed bin Salman meets Donald Trump. The US president hoped Saudi Arabia would share some of its wealth ‘in the form of the purchase of the finest military equipment in the world’.Mohammed bin Salman meets Donald Trump. The US president hoped Saudi Arabia would share some of its wealth ‘in the form of the purchase of the finest military equipment in the world’. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

An audience with four US presidents, dinner with Rupert Murdoch, and the opportunity to pitch business ventures to American moguls such as Oprah Winfrey and Tim Cook.

These are but some of the high-profile meetings on a leaked itinerary of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s whirlwind three-week, seven-city trip to the US, as the heir to the Saudi throne endeavors to sell an image of an evolving regime in an effort to pique interest in political and economic investment in Riyadh.A lunch menu for Donald Trump’s working lunch with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia in the Oval Office at the White House on 20 March.FacebookTwitterPinterestA lunch menu for Donald Trump’s working lunch with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia in the Oval Office at the White House on 20 March. Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images

The marathon sprint has already seen Bin Salman receive a warm welcome from Donald Trump at the White House. The leaked schedule – including sumac-crusted halibut with Trump and coffee at Starbucks with former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg – sheds light on the crown prince’s ambitions beyond Washington, with sights set on leaders spanning the tech titans of Silicon Valley to Hollywood’s rich and famous. As well as Trump, Bill Clinton, George W Bush and George HW Bush were all thought to be meeting with him.

The 32-year-old prince was appointed as heir to the Saudi throne by his father, King Salman, in June last year, and has since been regarded as the country’s de facto leader. He has fashioned himself as a reformer, vowing to modernize Saudi Arabia’s staunchly conservative regime.

Among his pledges are to break down some of the strict social rules that have earned Saudi Arabia the reputation of one of the most oppressive regimes in the world. Under Bin Salman’s stated vision, a 35-year ban on cinemas has been overturned and women have been told they will soon be allowed to drive.

And while skeptics argue the softer veneer is a smokescreen, aimed at masking Saudi Arabia’s continued human rights violations and aggressive posturing in the Middle East, the crown prince’s public relations campaign appears to be paying dividends in the US.Mohammed bin Salman meets former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg at a coffee shop in New York.FacebookTwitterPinterestMohammed bin Salman meets former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg at a coffee shop in New York. Photograph: Bandar Al-Jaloud/AFP/Getty Images

“Generally speaking, there is a lot of interest and openness towards what Mohammed bin Salman is doing, in the sense that he’s succeeded in pushing this narrative of a new Saudi Arabia,” said Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Project on US Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution.

“Americans have a soft spot for these simplistic messages of modernization, this idea that the backward Arabs are finally getting their act together … There’s always going to be an audience for it regardless of its authenticity.”Saudi crown prince begins US trip as allies share concerns about TrumpRead more

Indeed, Bin Salman’s charm offensive comes against the backdrop of heightened scrutiny over Saudi Arabia’s projection of power in an increasingly fragmented Middle East.

US support for the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen, which has resulted in a humanitarian crisis and the deaths of thousands of civilians, has been called into question and prompted a rare vote last week on reining in the president’s war powers. The Senate ultimately rejected a bipartisan attempt to limit American support for Saudi Arabia’s operations in Yemen on the same day Bin Salman sat down at the White House with Donald Trump.

Trump had boasted before the meeting that the US-Saudi relationship was “probably the strongest it’s ever been”.Mohammed bin Salman is shown a quadruped robot during his visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MassachusettsFacebookTwitterPinterestMohammed bin Salman is shown a quadruped robot during his visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Photograph: Bandar Al-Jaloud/AFP/Getty Images

“Saudi Arabia is a very wealthy nation and they’re going to give the United States some of that wealth, hopefully, in the form of jobs, in the form of the purchase of the finest military equipment anywhere in the world,” Trump added.

During the meeting, the two leaders also discussed their mutual opposition to the 2015 Iran nuclear accord. Trump has moved to decertify the landmark Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and is widely expected to reinstate sanctions on Tehran by a deadline of 12 May.

National security veterans have urged the president not to terminate the deal, but recent changes to Trump’s foreign policy team have elevated vocal Iran hawks to prominent positions.

Mike Pompeo, who until now has served as the director of the CIA, is poised to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state; and John Bolton, a former ambassador to the UN who argued in favor of bombing Iran, will serve as Trump’s new national security adviser following the departure of HR McMaster. Tillerson and McMaster were said to be more sympathetic to preserving the agreement, which lifted certain international sanctions on Iran after its leaders agreed to roll back the country’s nuclear program.

During his visit, Bin Salman has reiterated Saudi Arabia’s fierce opposition to the JCPOA and issued a sharp warning that the failure to reimpose sanctions on Tehran could escalate into military conflict in the region.Mohammed bin Salman and the US Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, attend the Saudi-US Partnership Gala event in Washington.FacebookTwitterPinterestMohammed bin Salman and the US Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, attend the Saudi-US Partnership Gala event in Washington. Photograph: Bandar Al-Jaloud/AFP/Getty Images

“If we don’t succeed in what we are trying to do, we will likely have war with Iran in 10-15 years,” Bin Salman told the Wall Street Journal this week.

In the interview, the crown prince also promised to lift more of the rigid societal restrictions that he said have prompted the country’s own people to seek opportunity outside its borders.

“We can’t drag people to live in Saudi Arabia in an environment that is not competitive,” he said.

“The environment in Saudi Arabia is pushing even Saudis outside Saudi Arabia. That is one reason we want social reforms.”

Despite the lifting of some barriers, rigid rules remain in place that require women to obtain a male guardian’s approval to acquire a passport, travel overseas or get married.

In a rare rebuke of the Saudi kingdom, a United Nations panel of independent experts reported that more than 60 well-known activists, including journalists, clerics and academics, had been detained since last September.

“This is an authoritarian regime that is becoming even more authoritarian, that has less and less tolerance for the most minimal dissent,” said Hamid.Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud is welcomed by the US secretary of defense, James Mattis, during his official visit to Washington.FacebookTwitterPinterestMohammed bin Salman Al Saud is welcomed by the US secretary of defense, James Mattis, during his official visit to Washington. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Bin Salman has nonetheless solidified a close rapport with the Trump administration, particularly through the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has regularly traveled to Riyadh over the past 10 months. With Kushner by his side, the crown prince has sought to further strengthen the political and business ties forged amid Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia last year, which marked the first time the country was chosen for a US president’s maiden foreign trip.

And although Bin Salman was warned by regional advisers ahead of his trip to Washington to draw some distance between himself and Trump, because of the US president’s volatility and unpredictable nature, the mutual admiration between the two was on full display as they sat down in the Oval Office last week.

After lavishing praise on the state of US-Saudi relations, Trump turned to the young successor and said: “You’re beyond the crown prince.”Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, has built a close rapport with the Saudi crown prince.FacebookTwitterPinterestJared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, has built a close rapport with the Saudi crown prince. Photograph: Pool/Getty ImagesTopics

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Global Research
Monetary Policy, Money Supply and The Bank of Canada
The Bank of Canada Should Be Reinstated To Its Original Mandated Purposes
By Professor John Ryan
Global Research, March 29, 2018
Canadian Dimension 21 March 2018
Region: Canada
Theme: Global Economy, History

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Few people understand the Canadian government’s relationship with the Bank of Canada or the nature of the Bank’s original raison d’être. Back in 2011 a lawsuit had been filed in the Federal Court by the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform against the Government of Canada and the Bank of Canada. The lawsuit attempted to:

[R]estore the use of the Bank of Canada to its original purpose, by exercising its public statutory duty and responsibility. That purpose includes making interest-free loans to the municipal/provincial/federal governments for ‘human capital’ expenditures (education, health, other social services) and/or infrastructure expenditures.

After nearly five and a half years of contentious litigation, after five court hearings resulting in contrary decisions, on May 4, 2017 the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear the appeal case, in “deference” to the political process, i.e., their decision was that the matter appeared to be more of a political issue than a judicial one. However, strong arguments can be made to the contrary and further court procedures may still take place. But in the meantime, since it appears that the issue at present cannot be resolved through a judicial process, there is now an urgent need to deal with this in the political arena.

The Bank of Canada was established as a private bank in 1934 under private ownership but in 1938 the government nationalized the bank so since then it has been publicly owned. It was mandated to lend not only to the federal government but to provinces and municipalities as well. To help bring Canada out of the Great Depression debt-free money was injected into various infrastructure projects. With the outbreak of World War II, it was the Bank of Canada that financed the enormously costly war effort – Canada created the world’s third largest navy and ranked fourth in production of allied war materiel. Afterwards, the Bank financed programs to assist WW2 veterans with vocational and university training and subsidized farmland.

For the next 30 years following World War II, it was the Bank of Canada that helped to transform Canada’s economy and lift the standards of living for Canadians. It was the Bank that financed a wide range of infrastructure projects and other ventures. This included the construction of the Trans-Canada highway, the St. Lawrence Seaway, airports, subway systems, and financial assistance to a corporation that placed Canada in the forefront of aviation technology – a project that was scuttled and destroyed by a controversial federal government decision. In addition, during this period seniors’ pensions, family allowances, and Medicare were established, as well as nation-wide hospitals, universities, and research facilities.

The critical point is that between 1939 and 1974 the federal government borrowed extensively from its own central bank. That made its debt effectively interest-free, since the government owned the bank and got the benefit of any interest. As such Canada emerged from World War II and from all the extensive infrastructure and other expenditures with very little debt. But following 1974 came a dramatic change.

In 1974 the Bank for International Settlements (the bank of central bankers) formed the Basel Committee to establish global monetary and financial stability. Canada, i.e., the Pierre Trudeau Liberals, joined in the deliberations. The Basel Committee’s solution to the “stagflation” problem of that time was to encourage governments to borrow from private banks and end the practice of borrowing interest-free from their own central banks. The effect of such a change would remove a powerful economic tool from the hands of democratic governments and give such control to a cabal of foreign bankers. This was one of Milton Friedman’s radical free-market ideas.

At that time Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, under influence of fellow Bilderberg attendees, somehow accepted this partisan flawed logic from the world’s top banks and allowed the function of the Bank of Canada to be dismantled. Worse still, without informing Canada’s parliament, Canada’s government then secretly and immediately stopped borrowing from the Bank of Canada. This was such a fundamental change of policy that it should not only have been debated in Parliament, this should have been put to a national referendum. Strangely, even when this became known, this was apparently never questioned by the opposition parties, especially the NDP, and never revealed in the media. Strange indeed.

Since then, Canada has lost sovereign control over its monetary policies and money supply. As a result, Canadians have been saddled with government debt at all levels – debt that has risen exponentially since 1974. During the time that the Bank of Canada provided additional money, interest-free, to federal and provincial governments when it was needed, according to data supplied by Jack Biddell, a former government accountant, the federal debt remained very low, relatively flat, and quite sustainable during all those years. (See his chart below.) In fact, in 1974 the country’s debt totalled only 18 billion dollars. When Canada stopped relying on its own bank it launched the country on a staggering deficit accumulation path. In 2016/17 the combined federal and provincial debt was $1.4 trillion. It’s estimated that perhaps half of this is the result of compound interest charges to private banks.

Image: A history of Canada’s debt, using or not using the Bank of Canada. Photo by Jack Biddell

Biddell’s chart, although dramatic, understates the actual reality since it shows a debt of $523 billion in 2005 – in 2016/17 the debt was more than twice this figure, being $1.4 trillion.

The debt curve that began its exponential rise in 1974 tilted toward the vertical in 1981, when interest rates were raised by the U.S. Federal Reserve to 20%. At 20% compounded annually, debt doubles in less than four years. Canadian rates went as high as 22% during that period. Canada has now paid over a trillion dollars in interest on its federal and provincial debt—nearly twice the actual debt itself. A further example of this is that in the early 1990s, at the height of the media’s deficit hysteria and the demand to cut social programs, 91 per cent of the $423-billion debt at that time was due to interest charges. Our real debt – revenue minus expenditures – was just $37 billion.

Although other points could still be presented, or some matters debated, the essence of this issue has been made clear. What now remains are a series of questions that need answers. Why did the federal government oppose the lawsuit in Federal Court that tried to force a restoration of the Bank of Canada to its mandated purposes? The lawsuit wanted the Bank of Canada to provide interest-free loans to the federal, provincial, and municipal governments, as provided for in the Bank of Canada Act. Why did the government oppose this? Was the government’s opposition to the lawsuit based on an agreement that may have been made by Prime Minister Trudeau in 1974 with Bank for International Settlements to henceforth not borrow money at no interest from the Bank of Canada?

Why did the Bank of Canada oppose the lawsuit that would have reactivated its ability to lend money at no interest to the government as mandated under the Bank of Canada Act?

After its meeting with the international bankers’ Basel Committee in 1974, the federal government proceeded to borrow money, with interest charges, from private banks and stopped dealing with its own bank that had no interest charges. This was done in secret and without the approval of parliament. Once this dereliction of duty to parliament and Canada’s people became known, why didn’t the opposition parties, especially the NDP, complain and make a major issue of his matter?

Why is it that Canada’s mainstream media has never brought any of these matters to the public’s attention? After the Supreme Court declined to deal with this case, citing specious reasoning that this was more of political issue than a judicial one, the media boycotted the story and therefore hardly anyone in Canada knows of this case. Canada’s top constitutional lawyer Rocco Galati who handled this lawsuit has always gotten major media attention, except for this case, which he considers to have been his most important lawsuit. Prior to this, Galati had been best known for stopping the Supreme Court appointment of Judge Marc Nadon, whose nomination had been put forward by Stephen Harper. Although Galati is unable to identify his sources, he states that he was informed that the government instructed the mainstream media to give this case, and prior lawsuits on this matter, limited coverage. And they complied. The story trickled out through alternative news sources.

In the course of five court hearings dealing with this case, Rocco Galati, as the lead lawyer, maintained that since Canada joined the Bank of International Settlements all their ensuing meetings have been kept secret. Their minutes, discussions and deliberations are secret and not available nor accountable to Canada’s Parliament, notwithstanding that the Bank of Canada policies emanate directly from these meetings. As Galati has stated: “These organizations are essentially private, foreign entities controlling Canada’s banking system and socio-economic policies.” As such, private foreign banks and financial interests, contrary to the Bank of Canada Act, dictate the Bank of Canada and Canada’s monetary and financial policy.

During the course of these court hearings, all these matters have been revealed and made crystal clear, but the mainstream media have effectively ignored these proceedings and have never revealed any of this vitally important information to the Canadian public. Why?

Although resolutions calling for a return to government borrowing from the Bank of Canada instead of the private banks have been passed at NDP conventions, it does not appear that the NDP has ever pursued this matter in Parliament. Why is this? This is a fundamentally important question. Has this been the result of lack of sufficient information or has there been some other reason? The NDP should pose the questions I have raised in this article in Parliament, and demand answers.

Since the Supreme Court has refused to hear the case, contending that this is more of a political issue than a judicial one, and before the case is pursued further in the courts, surely it behooves the NDP to pursue this matter. Not just pursue it, the NDP should make this a cause célèbre! Although the NDP is now in a distinct minority in Parliament, they should nevertheless pose questions to the government about its position on this critically important matter. Let the government try to defend its position, which in many ways is untenable and certainly not in the best interests of the Canadian public. The media would then have no choice but to reveal this to the public.

In any case, this issue should become a major plank in the NDP platform. If properly and fully pursued it could be of great help in getting support from the electorate. As it stands, it seems that the international banking cabal appears to have such a grip on Canada’s current capitalist government that it has refused to act in Canada’s best interests. As in the case of getting Medicare enacted in Canada, it may be up to a social democratic party to eventually get the Bank of Canada reinstated as the country’s bank.

Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. The Center of Research on Globalization grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: publications@globalresearch.ca

www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.

Does the US Military “Own the Weather”? “Weaponizing the Weather” as an Instrument of Modern Warfare?By Prof Michel ChossudovskyGlobal Research, January 08, 2018Global Research 12 September 2017Theme: Environment, Media Disinformation, Militarization and WMD, Science and Medicine

[print] 385 98 64 598

First published in September 2017.

Environmental modification techniques have been available to the US military for more than half a century.

The issue has been amply documented and should be part of the climate change debate.

Note: There is no evidence of “weather modification” in relation to recent climatic disturbances (hurricanes), but at the same time there is no firm evidence that this climate instability is attributable to greenhouse gas emissions.

The broader issue of environmental modification techniques must be addressed and carefully analyzed. It should also be understood that the instruments of weather warfare are part of the US arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their proposed use by the US military against “enemies” constitutes not only a crime against humanity but to put it mildly a threat to planet earth.

In this essay I am providing the reader with direct quotes from a US Air Force document on the use of environmental modification techniques which indelibly provide irrefutable evidence that the threats are real and must be addressed.

It should be noted that the US is blatantly in violation of a historic 1977 international Convention ratified by the UN General Assembly which banned “military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects.” (AP, 18 May 1977). Both the US and the Soviet Union were signatories to the Convention.

….Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to engage in military … use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury to any other State Party. (Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, United Nations, Geneva, May 18, 1977. Entered into force: 5 October 1978, see full text of Convention in Annex)

Michel Chossudovsky, January 9, 2017

***

US mathematician John von Neumann, in liaison with the US Department of Defense, started his research on weather modification in the late 1940s at the height of the Cold War and foresaw ‘forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined’. During the Vietnam war, cloud-seeding techniques were used, starting in 1967 under Project Popeye, the objective of which was to prolong the monsoon season and block enemy supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The US military has developed advanced capabilities that enable it selectively to alter weather patterns. The technology, which was initially developed in the 1990s under the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), was an appendage of the Strategic Defense Initiative – ‘Star Wars’. From a military standpoint, HAARP –which was officially abolished in 2014– is a weapon of mass destruction, operating from the outer atmosphere and capable of destabilising agricultural and ecological systems around the world.

Officially, the HAARP program has been closed down at its location in Alaska. The technology of weather modification shrouded in secrecy, nonetheless prevails. HAARP documents confirm that the technology was fully operational in the mid 1990s.

(For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: Owning the Weather for Military Use, first published by Global Research in 2006).

It should be emphasized that while the US military confirms that weather warfare is fully operational, there is no documented evidence of its military use against enemies of the US. The subject matter is a taboo among environmental analysts. No in-depth investigation has been undertaken to reveal the operational dimensions of weather warfare.

The irony is that the impacts of ENMOD techniques for military use were documented by CBC TV in the early 1990s.

The CBC TV report acknowledged that the HAARP facility in Alaska under the auspices of the US Air Force had the ability of triggering typhoons, earthquakes, floods and droughts: .

Directed energy is such a powerful technology it could be used to heat the ionosphere to turn weather into a weapon of war. Imagine using a flood to destroy a city or tornadoes to decimate an approaching army in the desert. The military has spent a huge amount of time on weather modification as a concept for battle environments. If an electromagnetic pulse went off over a city, basically all the electronic things in your home would wink and go out, and they would be permanently destroyed.”

CBC TV Report

Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather

In this article we will provide key quotations from a US 1996 US Air Force document which analyzes weather modification techniques for military use.

The underlying objective from a military standpoint is “Owning the Weather”.

At the time this study was commissioned in 1996, the HAARP program was already fully operational as documented by the CBC documentary.

The stated purpose of the Report is described below:

In this paper we show that appropriate application of weather-modification can provide battlespace dominance to a degree never before imagined. In the future, such operations will enhance air and space superiority and provide new options for battlespace shaping and battlespace awareness there, waiting for us to pull it all together;” in 2025 we can “Own the Weather.” US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report,

Weather-modification, according to the US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report,

“offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary”, capabilities, it says, extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes:

‘Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.”

See complete reports commissioned by the US Air Force at

http://csat.au.af.mil/2025/volume3/vol3ch15.pdf

….From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary. Some of the potential capabilities a weather-modification system could provide to a war-fighting commander in chief (CINC) are listed in table 1.

Source: US Air Force

Why Would We Want to Mess with the Weather? is the subtitle of chapter 2 of the Report

According to Gen Gordon Sullivan, former Army chief of staff, “As we leap technology into the 21st century, we will be able to see the enemy day or night, in any weather— and go after him relentlessly.” global, precise, real-time, robust, systematic weather-modification capability would provide war-fighting CINCs with a powerful force multiplier to achieve military objectives. Since weather will be common to all possible futures, a weather-modification capability would be universally applicable and have utility across the entire spectrum of conflict. The capability of influencing the weather even on a small scale could change it from a force degrader to a force multiplier.

Under the heading:

What Do We Mean by “Weather-modification”?

The report states:

The term weather-modification may have negative connotations for many people, civilians and military members alike. It is thus important to define the scope to be considered in this paper so that potential critics or proponents of further research have a common basis for discussion.

In the broadest sense, weather-modification can be divided into two major categories: suppression and intensification of weather patterns. In extreme cases, it might involve the creation of completely new weather patterns, attenuation or control of severe storms, or even alteration of global climate on a far-reaching and/or long-lasting scale. In the mildest and least controversial cases it may consist of inducing or suppressing precipitation, clouds, or fog for short times over a small-scale region. Other low-intensity applications might include the alteration and/or use of near space as a medium to enhance communications, disrupt active or passive sensing, or other purposes. (emphasis added)

Critical to the success of any attempt to trigger a storm cell is the pre-existing atmospheric conditions locally and regionally. The atmosphere must already be conditionally unstable and the large-scale dynamics must be supportive of vertical cloud development. The focus of the weather-modification effort would be to provide additional “conditions” that would make the atmosphere unstable enough to generate cloud and eventually storm cell development. The path of storm cells once developed or enhanced is dependent not only on the mesoscale dynamics of the storm but the regional and synoptic (global) scale atmospheric wind flow patterns in the area which are currently not subject to human control. (page 19)

Is the CIA involved in Climate Engineering?

The Involvement of the CIA in Climate Change Technologies

Back in July 2013, MSN news reported that the CIA was involved in helping to fund a project by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) focusing on geo-engineering and climate manipulation. The report not only acknowledged these technologies, it confirmed that US intelligence has been routinely involved in addressing the issue of climatic manipulation:

The CIA is helping fund the research because the NAS also plans to evaluate “the national security concerns (that could be) related to geoengineering technologies being deployed somewhere in the world,” Kearney said.

In an emailed statement, Christopher White, a spokesman for the CIA’s office of public affairs, told MSN, “On a subject like climate change, the agency works with scientists to better understand the phenomenon and its implications on national security.”

Although the CIA and the NAS are tight-lipped about what these concerns might be, one researcher notes that geoengineering has the potential to deliberately disrupt the weather for terrorist or military goals.

John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-based firm that specializes in addressing emerging security concerns, says that worries about the potential impact of geoengineering aren’t as paramount as the potential security issues that could arise if the United States doesn’t use the technology.

“A failure to engage in geoengineering could impact the political stability of other countries, and that could lead to trouble for the U.S.,” he said.

The NAS project is supported by the U.S. intelligence community, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Department of Energy.

“historical examples of related technologies (e.g., cloud seeding and other weather modification) for lessons that might be learned about societal reactions, examine what international agreements exist which may be relevant to the experimental testing or deployment of geoengineering technologies, and briefly explore potential societal and ethical considerations related to geoengineering. This study is intended to provide a careful, clear scientific foundation that informs ethical, legal, and political discussions surrounding geoengineering.

(See http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/projectview.aspx?key=49540)

According to a 2015 report in the Independent (screenshot above), quoting a renowned US scientist Alan Robock:

A senior American climate scientist has spoken of the fear he experienced when US intelligence services apparently asked him about the possibility of weaponising the weather as a major report on geo-engineering is to be published this week.

Professor Alan Robock stated that three years ago, two men claiming to be from the CIA had called him to ask whether experts would be able to tell if hostile forces had begun manipulating the US’s weather, though he suspected the purpose of the call was to find out if American forces could meddle with other countries’ climates instead. (emphasis added)

Order Directly from Global Research PublishersThe Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

original

America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine —coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.

This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history.

It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.

Become a Member of Global ResearchRelated ArticlesSelected Articles: 2016 US Elections: Evidence for “Israelgate”? Russia Was a Scapegoat?Mar 21, 2018“Fake News” and World War III. The Danger of Nuclear AnnihilationMar 14, 2018Selected Articles: Global WarfareMar 8, 2018A Constant Reminder to a Constant War. Militarism in American SocietyFeb 10, 2018Selected Articles: US Military Confrontation with Russia and ChinaJan 22, 2018Costs of 2017 US Weather Disasters Demolish Previous RecordJan 20, 2018

[print] 385 98 64 598Articles by: Prof Michel ChossudovskyAbout the author:Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He has taught as visiting professor in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Latin America. He has served as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international organizations. He is the author of eleven books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), The Global Economic Crisis, The Great Depression of the Twenty-first Century (2009) (Editor), Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011), The Globalization of War, America's Long War against Humanity (2015). He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO's war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He can be reached at crgeditor@yahoo.com

Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. The Center of Research on Globalization grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: publications@globalresearch.ca

www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.

It's taken nearly two weeks, but the Association of National Advertisers today addressed reports that President Trump's consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, obtained personal data from 50 million Facebook users.

"Our collective ecosystem can disappoint -- and, in certain instances, it materially fails us," the ANA acknowledged today in a statement about the debacle. "The current global outrage over the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data issue represents enormous frustration with institutions that fall short on promises of protection and safeguards."

The group adds that the industry "has a responsibility to strengthen consumers’ fundamental rights to privacy."

The ANA's latest statement is fairly general, but the group offers at least one proposal -- that the "ecoysystem" should "systematically 'report back' to consumers what advertisers know and what choices consumers have to protect their privacy."

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"We need to take this as a wake-up call to do better," ANA chief executive officer Bob Liodice tells MediaPost.

"What we're suggesting is that consumers should have a basic understanding of what information is being retained," Liodice says, adding that consumers should be able to decide "in a more aggressive way" what information about them should be discarded by the major platforms.

The organization also argues that Facebook (and other platforms) should provide advertisers with more information. "Transparency must be accepted as the cost of entry for all 'walled garden' platforms to engage brands," the ANA writes. "What happens in the dark shadows of those 'walls' is seldom clear and understandable to consumers and advertisers...Neither consumers nor brands are served by Walled Gardens that prevent complete transparency, accountability, and measurement."

At the same time, the group clearly aims to stave off regulations, like Europe's GDPR, which will give European consumers more control over their data. "The GDPR is a blunt response that may provide some degree of consumer protection," the ANA stated today. "However, the cost to the free-flowing information transfer system is substantial."

In the U.S., the ANA lobbied extensively against privacy regulations, including a set of broadband privacy rules that were passed by the Federal Communications Commission, but later repealed by Congress.

The ANA's new statement comes one day after the Advertising Research Foundation called for new ad industry standards governing consumer data.

For its part, Facebook said this week that it will revamp its privacy settings to make it easier for users to manage data about themselves.

About the Author

Wendy Davis is a Senior Writer at MediaPost. You can reach Wendy at wdavis@mediapost.com

Investors betting on the economic promise of Africa should be looking to the north of the continent.

That’s according to the 2018 Africa Investment Index (AII) compiled by Quantum Global Research Lab, the research arm of a private investment group. Northern Africa dominates the top of the list, with Morocco, Egypt and Algeria taking up the top three positions respectively. Morocco’s emergence as the top investment destination, one place up from last year, is attributed to its “receptive business environment” and “low risk profile.” Egypt and Algeria score high marks for liquidity.

The index was released yesterday (March 26) on the sidelines of the Africa CEO Forum in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Mthuli Ncube, the managing director of the lab, said the AII is compiled by measuring six major factors—growth, liquidity, risk, business environment, demography and social capital—to “paint a picture of the investment attractiveness of countries in the medium term.” In contrast, he said, the World Bank’s “Doing Business” report focuses “too much on institutional factors.”

Botswana, fourth on the index, is the highest ranked country in sub-Saharan Africa, and scores highly in business environment and risk factor parameters. But it’s a bit of a slump for a country that was ranked last year as the continent’s top destination on the index, and that has been emerging as a leader on the continent after standing up to US president Donald Trump.

Some of Africa’s leading commodity-based economies do not feature among the top draws. After periods of recession, Nigeria (ranked 14th) and Angola (ranked 19th) are only just starting to recover as the price of oil—their biggest exports—has rebounded after a two-year slump.Ranking Top ten countries1 Morocco2 Egypt3 Algeria4 Botswana5 Cote d’Ivoire6 South Africa7 Ethiopia8 Zambia9 Kenya10 Senegal

Aside from a broad ranking, the index also identifies leading countries based on each measuring factor. Ethiopia, having averaged 8.4% GDP growth in the past three years, takes the top spot for growth, while South Sudan’s oil-dependent and cash-based economy is the best ranked for the liquidity. Botswana offers investors the least risk, while Nigeria, with more than 180 million people, is the top ranked by demographics. Seychelles, with its “high trade openness” is ranked as the most conducive business environment and, for social capital, Tunisia is determined to be the easiest country to establish personal and business relationships.Ranking Bottom 10 countries1 Central Africa Republic2 Liberia3 Somalia4 Eritrea5 Equatorial Guinea6 Gambia7 Sierra Leone8 Guinea9 Sao Tome and Principe10 Zimbabwe

Sign up for the Quartz Africa Weekly Brief — the most important and interesting news from across the continent, in your inbox.homeour pickspopularlatestobsessionssearch

KEEP YOUR EYES OPENHow to track China’s falling space labEcho HuangMarch 27, 2018China's first space lab Tiangong-1 is falling back to earth in March or April 2018.Breaking down the fall. (Aerospace Corporation)

China’s first space lab is coming back to earth in days. Launched in 2011, Tiangong-1, whose name means Heavenly Palace, was a milestone that marked China’s determination to catch up to or even outpace global space powers.

The lab ceased functioning in 2016 and is now making an uncontrolled descent, which makes it hard to predict exactly where it will fall. Although most of the lab, which weighs 8.5 metric tons, is expected to burn up as it re-enters the earth’s atmosphere, some small fragments could survive. But don’t worry, it’s quite rare for people here on earth to be hit by space debris.

The lab fragments, if any, are expected to land somewhere between the latitudes of 43ºN and 43ºS, an area largely covered by the ocean but that also includes countries like the US, Brazil, Spain, and China itself. If you want to track Tiangong-1’s return, here’s how to do it:Space agencies

The European Space Agency is providing re-entry updates every day or two on its blog, including on the lab’s potential landing zone, its altitude changes, and the re-entry window, which the agency currently puts between March 30 and April 2.

China’s Manned Space Engineering Office has been making a daily announcement (link in Chinese) on the average orbiting height of the lab since the middle of this month. In May 2017, the agency told the United Nations that the lab would land between October that year and April 2018. The downside, however, is that the announcements are only available in Chinese. The agency said Monday (March 26) that the lab could fall between March 31 to April 4 (link in Chinese).Research organizations

Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded US space-research organization, features a re-entry dashboard on its site, which presents a map of the lab’s current position and orbit and predicted time to re-entry. The dashboard updates every few minutes. The firm predicts that the lab will land April 1, plus or minus two days.Tiangong-1's reentry dashboard.Aerospace Corporation’s Tiangong-1 re-entry dashboard. (Screengrab from Aerospace Corporation)

Morris Jones, an Australian space analyst, told Quartz he recommends N2yo.com, a satellite-tracking site established in 2006. The site offers real-time tracking of the lab’s orbiting period, a map of the lab’s location, such as the countries and oceans it’s flying above, and its orbiting speed—right now it’s circling earth once every 90 minutes or so. It can also use your IP address to give you an idea of the lab’s location relative to you.

Heavens-above, a satellite tracking site recommended by Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, can tell you when you can see Tiangong-1 passing in the sky above your city, and which direction it’s moving in.

Of course, there’s a chance you might just spot the lab as it burns up during its fall. McDowell says that might look like what some people saw when a rocket of about Tiangong-1’s weight fell near the Peru-Brazil border in January—a fiery, white light in the sky.

If fragments of the lab do fall near you, don’t touch them. They could potentially be covered by a toxic, corrosive substance, says the Aerospace Corporation.Social media

You can also keep track of where the Tiangong-1 is in tweets, including from McDowell, as well as other scientists and institutions, such as Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques.

Read next: China’s falling space lab is a prism for its space ambitions

Read next: China’s plummeting space station is just a taste of the world’s space junk problemhomeour pickspopularlatestobsessionssearch

Our eyes are hardening; we can barely see our phones anymore. We must learn to look at the wider world.

The eyes are unwell. Their childhood suppleness is lost. The lenses, as we log hours on this earth, thicken, stiffen, even calcify. The eyes are no longer windows on souls. They’re closer to teeth.

To see if your own eyes are hardening, look no further than your phone, which should require no exertion; you’re probably already there. Keep peering at your screen, reading and staring, snubbing life’s third dimension and natural hues. The first sign of the eyes’ becoming teeth is the squinting at phones. Next comes the reflexive extending of the arm, the impulse to resize letters into the preschool range. And at last the buying of drugstore readers.

Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is an Ideas contributor at WIRED. She is the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. She is also a cohost of Trumpcast, an op-ed columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and a frequent contributor to Politico. Before coming to WIRED she was a staff writer at the New York Times—first a TV critic, then a magazine columnist, and then an opinion writer. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree and PhD in English from Harvard. In 1979 she stumbled onto the internet, when it was the back office of weird clerics, and she’s been in the thunderdome ever since.

Modern medicine offers little apart from magnifying glasses to treat presbyopia (from the Greek presbus, meaning “old man”). But those $3.99 specs will get you on your feet just fine, which is to say, you can once again relish your phone without squinting or arm-stretching. A remedy for farsightedness evidently succeeds to the degree that it restores a woman or man to the comfortable consumption of texts, email, ecommerce, and social media on a glazed rectangle of aluminum alloys held at a standard reading distance of 16 inches. With reading glasses we live again.

Doesn’t this seem like an unwholesome loop? The eyes may be unwell, but the primary object of our eyesight seems corrosive. We measure our vision against the phone, all the while suspecting the phone itself is compromising our ability to see it.

Even if we don’t say out loud that failing vision has something to do with our vastly narrowed visual field, our bodies seem to know what’s up. How convenient, for example, that you can turn up a phone’s contrast and brightness with a few taps. If perception can’t be improved, objects can be made more perceivable, right? But then the brightness seems, like morphine, to produce a need for more brightness, and you find yourself topping out, hitting the button in vain for more light only to realize that’s it. You’ve blinded yourself to the light that was already there.

Having recently, in my forties, gotten reading glasses, I now find myself having to choose between reading and being, since I can’t read without them and I can’t see the world with them. The glasses date from a time when reading was much rarer a pastime than being; you’d grope for them to see a book, while relying on your naked eyes for driving, talking, walking.

But of course now so many of us read all day long. And I opt to flood my field of vision with the merry play of pixels and emoji rather than the less scintillating, brown-gray “real world.” This means wearing the reading glasses, even on the street, and affecting blindness to everything but my phone.

What might modern vision be today without the phone as its reason for being? If you were a nomadic goatherd in the Mongolian grasslands, you might not even consider presbyopia a pathology. Many nomads carry cell phones for calls and music, but, except to play games, they rarely gaze at them. Instead, they rest their eyes on the ever-moving flock, alert to vagaries in the animals’ collective configuration and inclinations; but simultaneously they soften the vision to wide angle, so as to detect peripheral anomalies and threats. On camelback in the wide-open grasslands, the eyes line easily with the horizon, which means their eyes take in distance, proximity, an unpixelated spectrum, and unsimulated movement. A panoramic view of the horizon line roots the beholder in the geometer’s simplest concepts of perspective: foreshortening, a vanishing point, linearity, and the changeable shadows cast by the movement of the sun over and under the horizon line. That third dimension—depth—is never, ever forgotten by the nomads. The sun rises and sets on depth.

See more from the Life Issue.April 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.Nik Mirus

Depending on your after-hours curriculum in Mongolia (cooking, talking, playing the fiddle), you might rarely even need to do what digital moderns never stop doing: recruit the eye’s ciliary muscle and contract it, releasing tension in the ligaments that suspend the eye to acutely curve the lens and train it to a pixelated 1.4-milimeter letter x on, for instance, a mobile news app. If you explained to a nomad the failures of her aging eyes, she might shrug: Who needs anxious ciliary muscles?

Indeed. And the use of those muscles by digital moderns gets even more complicated when we encounter our x’s not on paper—carbon-­black ink, like liquid soot, inscribed on bleached pulpwood—but on screens. That’s where we come across the quivering and uncertain symbols that play across the—surface, is it? Where are they exactly? Somewhere on or in our devices. No wonder the eyes are unwell.

There are at least two recorded cases of something called smartphone blindness. The New England Journal of Medicine notes that both patients had been reading their phones in bed, on their sides, faces half-hidden, in the dark. “We hypothesized that the symptoms were due to differential bleaching of photo-­pigment, with the viewing eye becoming light-adapted.” Differential bleaching of the eyes! Fortunately, smartphone blindness of this kind is transient.Related Stories

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The blanket term for screen-borne eyesight problems is computer vision syndrome, an unsatisfactory name given to the blurring, dry eyes, and headaches suffered by the people of the screen. The name is unsatisfactory because, like many syndromes, it describes a set of phenomena without situating them in a coherent narrative—medical or otherwise. For contrast, arc eye is a burn: Welders get it from their exposure to bright ultraviolet light. Snowblindness is caused when corneas are sunburned by light reflecting off snow. Hallucinations afflict lookouts because, as Ishmael explains in Moby-Dick, they’re up at odd hours and alone, parsing the “blending cadence of waves with thoughts” for danger, whales, or other vessels; the brain and eyes are inclined to make meaning and mirages of undifferentiated land- and seascapes where none exist.

Computer vision syndrome is not nearly as romantic. The American Optometric Association uses it to describe the discomfort that people report feeling after looking at screens for a “prolonged” period of time. When screens pervade the field of vision all day, what counts as prolonged? (Moreover, reports of discomfort seem like not much to predicate a whole syndrome on.) But the AOA’s treatment of the syndrome is intriguing. This is the so-called 20-20-20 rule, which asks that screen people take a 20-second break to look at something 20 feet away every 20 minutes.

The remedy helps us reverse-engineer the syndrome. This suffering is thought to be a function not of blue light or intrusive ads or bullying and other scourges. It’s thought to be a function of unbroken concentration on a screen 8 inches to 2 feet from the eyes. The person suffering eyestrain is taught to look 20 feet away but she might presumably look at a painting or a wall. Twenty feet, though, suggests it’s depth she may be thirsty for.

The naming of a syndrome discharges the latest anxiety about screens, which have always been a source of social suspicion. People who are glued to screens to the exclusion of other people are regarded with disdain: narcissistic, withholding, deceitful, sneaky. This was true even with the panels that prefigured electronic screens, including shoji, as well as mirrors and newspaper broadsheets. The mirror-gazer may have been the first selfie fanatic, and in the heyday of mirrors the truly vain had handheld mirrors they toted around the way we carry phones. And hand fans and shoji—forget it. The concealing and revealing of faces allowed by fans and translucent partitions suggest the masquerade and deceptions of social media. An infatuation with screens can easily slide into a moral failing.

Not long ago a science writer named Gabriel Popkin began leading tree walks for city dwellers in Washington, DC, whose monomaniacal attention to screens had left them tree-blind. That’s right, tree blindness—and the broader concept of blindness to the natural world—might actually be the real danger screens pose to vision. In 2012, Popkin had learned about trees to cure this blindness in himself and went from a naif who could barely pick out an oak tree to an amateur arboriculturist who can distinguish hundreds of trees. The biggest living beings in his city suddenly seemed like friends to him, with features he could recognize and relish.

I opt to flood my field of vision with the merry play of pixels and emoji rather than the brown-gray “real world.” This means wearing reading glasses, even on the street, and affecting blindness to everything but my phone.

Once he could see trees, they became objects of intense interest to him—more exhilarating than apps, if you can believe it. “Take a moment to watch and listen to a flowering redbud tree full of pollen-drunk bumblebees,” he has written. “I promise you won’t be bored.”

If computer vision syndrome has been invented as a catch-all to express a whole range of fears, those fears may not be confined to what blue light or too much close-range texting are doing to the eyesight. Maybe the syndrome is a broader blindness—eyes that don’t know how to see and minds that increasingly don’t know how to recognize nondigital artifacts, especially nature.

Lately, when I pull away from the screen to stare into the middle distance for a spell, I take off my glasses. I try to find a tree. If I’m inside, I open a window; if I’m outside, I will even approach a tree. I don’t want mediation or glass. The trees are still strangers; I hardly know their names yet, but I’m testing myself on leaf shapes and shades of green. All I know so far is that trees are very unlike screens. They’re a prodigious interface. Very buggy. When my eyes settle after a minute or two, I—what’s that expression, “the scales fell from my eyes”? It’s almost, at times, like that.Read More

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According to many experts, chronic, heavy exposure to wireless radiation is likely having severe repercussions for our health, especially that of children, who are now being exposed even before birth
While a number of different devices contribute to the overall radiation burden, those kept closest to your body on a regular basis, such as your cellphone, are of greatest concern
Your body has natural electromagnetic fields (EMFs), as many of your bodily processes involves the transmission of electric signals, and external interference can disrupt those signals
Inside every cell in your body are mitochondria, the power plants of your cell, and they are adversely impacted by EMFs, resulting in mitochondrial and cellular dysfunction
Two organs most vulnerable to outside RF interference are your heart and brain. Both also have the highest density of voltage gated calcium channels, which are inappropriately activated by EMFs, thereby causing most of the damage associated with EMF exposure

By Dr. Mercola

Most people today live in a sea of radiofrequencies (RF), emitted from wireless technologies of all kinds, from routers to smartphones, tablets, baby monitors, TVs, appliances, smart meters and more. In the featured ABC program “Wi-Fried,” originally aired in 2016, Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., investigates the alleged safety of mobile devices.

According to many experts, chronic, heavy exposure could be having severe repercussions for our health, especially that of children, who are now being exposed even before birth.

As noted by Devra Davis, Ph.D., an epidemiologist and author of the book, “Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation,” children have never before been exposed to this level of pulsed radiation, and it’s still too early to determine the exact extent of the harm. Still, mounting evidence suggests harm is indeed occurring, so it would be foolish to wait until we’re in the midst of a global catastrophe.
External Interference Can Disrupt Your Body’s Natural Bioelectric Signals

While a number of different devices contribute to the overall radiation burden, those kept closest to your body on a regular basis, such as your cellphone, are of greatest concern. Worldwide, there are more than 6 billion cellphone subscriptions. In other words, we’re rapidly nearing total saturation, where every single person on the planet has one of these devices.

Many of these mobile phones are smartphones, with apps that frequently receive and transmit pulsed electromagnetic signals. The human body also has natural electromagnetic fields (EMFs), as many of your bodily processes involves the transmission of electric signals, and as noted by Demasi, “External interference can disrupt those signals.” In a 2016 article, Jerry Phillips, Ph.D., a biochemist and director of the Excel Science Center at the University of Colorado, explained how living cells react to RF radiation:1

“The signal couples with … cells, although nobody really knows what the nature of that coupling is. Some effects of that reaction can be things like movement of calcium across membranes, the production of free radicals or a change in the expression of genes in the cell.

Suddenly important proteins are being expressed at times and places and in amounts that they shouldn’t be, and that has a dramatic effect on the function of the cells. And some of these changes are consistent with what’s seen when cells undergo conversion from normal to malignant.”

When you consider that your body runs on bioelectricity, it’s easier to understand how and why biological damage from wireless phones might occur.2 For starters, your body has natural EMFs, as many of your bodily processes involves the transmission of electric signals, and external interference can disrupt those signals.

In recent years, it’s become increasingly clear that mitochondrial dysfunction is at the root of most chronic disease, so in terms of public health, the effects of chronic EMF exposure may be far more profound than currently suspected. We may not only face an avalanche of brain cancer in coming decades, but also heart disease, neurological disease and infertility.
Your Heart and Brain Are Most Susceptible to EMF Damage

Two of the organs that are the most vulnerable to outside RF interference are your heart and your brain. Both of these organs also have the highest density of voltage gated calcium channels (VGCCs). Research.3,4,5,6 by Martin Pall, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of biochemistry and basic medical sciences at Washington State University,7 suggests VGCCs are activated by low-intensity EMFs such as those emitted from cellphones, triggering an excessive influx of calcium into the cell.

The excess intracellular calcium and the increased calcium signaling appears to be responsible for most if not all of the biological effects associated with EMF exposure, which include an increase in:

Neuropsychiatric disorders and diseases such as anxiety, depression, ADHD, autism and Alzheimer’s8

Hormonal effects

Cardiac effects

Chromosomal breaks

Impaired fertility especially in men

Oxidative stress

Changes in calcium signaling

Cellular DNA damage

Breakdown of the blood-brain barrier

Cancer

Melatonin depletion

Sleep disruption
Recent Research Confirms EMF-Induced Health Effects

As early as 1990, before there even was a consumer cellphone industry, at least two dozen epidemiological studies on humans indicated a link between EMF and/or RF and serious health problems, including childhood leukemia. Most recently, two government-funded studies9,10,11,12,13 — one on mice and one on rats — found evidence of heart tumors and damage to the brain and DNA.

This $25 million research, conducted by the National Toxicology Program — an interagency research program housed at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences — is said to be the most extensive to date, and it confirms that the heart and brain are key areas affected by high, chronic EMF exposure.

Male testes are a third area with high VGCC density, and indeed, studies have linked EMF exposure to male fertility problems as well. Cellphone radiation has been linked to a reduction in sperm motility and viability,15,16 and Wi-Fi equipped laptops have been linked to sperm DNA fragmentation after just four hours of use.17

Disturbingly, most people will carry their cellphones either in their breast pocket or pants pocket, effectively radiating the most sensitive parts of their body — their heart and reproductive organs. Then, when talking on the phone, they will place it to their ear, exposing their brain.

Pregnant women are also exposing their unborn children to harmful radiation when carrying a cellphone on their body, or using it near their body. According to recent research, prenatal exposure to power-frequency fields can nearly triple a pregnant woman’s risk of miscarriage.18 Several other studies have also linked prenatal EMF exposure to an increased risk of miscarriage.19,20,21,22,23
Why We’re Not Seeing Dramatic Increases in Brain Cancer

With regard to brain cancer, it’s important to remember that brain cancer typically has a long latency period. According to Davis, it took 40 years before the brain cancer rate in the Japanese population spiked after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Compared to radioactive radiation, RF is likely far less carcinogenic, but the fact that we have not seen a dramatic increase in brain cancer rates as of yet is by no means proof that flooding your brain with RFs is harmless.

It simply means we haven’t been using cellphones long enough yet. In my view, it seems really foolish to make such a gamble with entire generations of people. Davis also points out that if you want to get an indication of how cellphone use is influencing brain cancer rates, you have to look at the types of brain tumors that have become predominant, and the groups in which they occur.

In recent years, we have in fact seen a statistically significant uptick in brain cancer in younger people and children. We’ve also seen an increase in tumors situated near the ear on the side people hold their phones.
Most People Breach the Safety Limits of Their Cellphones

Also noted in the featured video is that anytime you carry your phone on your body and it is not in airplane mode, you are, breaching the safety limits of your phone. This safety limit, known as the specific absorption rate (SAR), is typically buried in the legal section of your phone, but will state that you need to keep the phone at a specified distance from your body to prevent overexposure and potential heat damage.

Demasi’s cellphone specified a safety limit of 10 millimeters, meaning she would need to keep it at least 1 centimeter from her body at all times. So, it’s important to realize that your cellphone no longer complies with safety regulations once it’s placed in your pocket or bra. It’s also worth noting that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) bases its thermal safety standards on a model that does not apply to the population at large, especially not children.

The standards are based on a model called “standard anthropomorphic man,” a model much larger than the average person. The larger the body, the shallower the penetration of the radiation, so SAR levels are likely too generous for most people. The experts interviewed believe it’s safe to say that most people breach the SAR limits of their phones on a daily basis, possibly exposing themselves to heat-induced cell damage.

However, it’s important to realize that the SAR value of your phone is worthless when it comes to assessing the safety of your phone, as the most significant damage is not caused by heating. In reality, there’s no such thing as a safe cellphone, as they all emit EMFs. The only way to make it safe is to turn it off, or keep it in airplane mode, which suspends RF signal transmissions. Pall calculates that the safety standards based on thermal damage, not molecular biology, are off by a factor of 7 million.

As noted in the video, safety standards are based on the decades old and now-debunked theory that no damage can occur unless the tissue is heated, but mounting evidence strongly suggests this simply isn’t true, and a number of different mechanisms of harm have been presented in the scientific literature in recent years.
Two Crucial Ways EMFs Harm Your Health

There’s even evidence suggesting that radiation affects your microbiome, turning what might otherwise be beneficial microbes pathogenic. This too can have far-ranging health effects, since we now know your microbiome plays an important role in health. Importantly, while the mechanisms may differ, the end result is often the same. In short, EMFs:

Protecting Yourself and Your Children From Excessive EMF Is a Health Priority

As of September 2018, France will impose a complete ban on cellphone use by primary and secondary school students during school hours.24 Students will not be permitted to use their phones even at breaks, lunch or between classes. California also recently issued consumer guidance on how to lower cellphone radiation exposure (after initially trying to cover up the hazards).25

Russia has also implemented laws to minimize Wi-Fi exposure in schools,26 and countries like Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Israel and China have RF exposure limits that are up to 10,000 times lower than the U.S.27

In my mind, EMF exposure is unquestionably a significant health hazard that needs to be addressed if you’re concerned about your health. Schools, especially, really should take a step back and begin to implement strategies to protect students. There’s simply no reason to flood children with wireless signals all day long.

In the featured video, an Australian school simply installed an on/off switch on the router in each classroom. Unless online access is required for a particular lesson, the Wi-Fi is turned off. If you have Wi-Fi in your home, I would recommend implementing a similar strategy at home.
Helpful Strategies to Reduce Your EMF Exposure

Here are several other suggestions that will also help reduce your EMF exposure:

Connect your desktop computer to the internet via a wired Ethernet connection and be sure to put your desktop in airplane mode. Also avoid wireless keyboards, trackballs, mice, game systems, printers and portable house phones and opt for wired versions.

If you must use Wi-Fi, shut it off when not in use, especially at night when you are sleeping. Ideally, work toward hardwiring your house so you can eliminate Wi-Fi altogether. If you have a notebook without any Ethernet ports, a USB Ethernet adapter will allow you to connect to the internet with a wired connection.

Shut off the electricity to your bedroom at night. This typically works to reduce electrical fields from the wires in your wall unless there is an adjoining room next to your bedroom. If that is the case, use an EMF meter to determine if you also need to power down the adjacent room.

Use a battery-powered alarm clock, ideally one without any light. I use a talking clock for the visually impaired.28

If you still use a microwave oven, consider replacing it with a steam convection oven, which will heat your food as quickly and far more safely.

Avoid using “smart” appliances and thermostats that depend on wireless signaling. This would include all new “smart” TVs. They are called smart because they emit a Wi-Fi signal, and unlike your computer, you cannot shut the Wi-Fi signal off. Consider using a large computer monitor as your TV instead, as they don’t emit Wi-Fi.

Refuse smart meters as long as you can, or add a shield to an existing smart meter, some of which have been shown to reduce radiation by 98 to 99 percent.29

Consider moving your baby’s bed into your bedroom instead of using a wireless baby monitor. Alternatively, use a hard-wired monitor.

Replace CFL bulbs with incandescent bulbs. Ideally remove all fluorescent lights from your house. Not only do they emit unhealthy light, but more importantly, they will actually transfer current to your body just being close to the bulbs.

Avoid carrying your cellphone on your body unless in airplane mode and never sleep with it in your bedroom unless it is in airplane mode. Even in airplane mode it can emit signals, which is why I put my phone in a Faraday bag.30

When using your cellphone, use the speaker phone and hold the phone at least 3 feet away from you. Seek to radically decrease your time on the cellphone. I typically use my cellphone less than 30 minutes a month, and mostly when traveling. Instead, use VoIP software phones that you can use while connected to the internet via a wired connection.
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